2 Kinds of Fear

Be Not Afraid, Part 1

I was speaking with a friend of mine recently
about the food shortages that are being blared from every media outlet, the
rumors of recession that darken the financial reports, and the threat of
further hostilities in the Middle East, which seem to flare up with all the
regularity of a recurrent skin disease.

This friend and I were discussing
the possibility of moving out of the city and holing our families up on a
little patch of land with some goats and miniature donkeys, when she said
something that put the whole matter into perspective: “I’ve stopped washing my
hair.”

Confused, though fundamentally
sympathetic, I asked what this had to do with the fall of the American Empire.
Sheepishly, she revealed her great fear: not that she would starve, not that
there would be riots in the streets or that tyrants would rise up as they have
done so often in the past to “lead the people through the crisis” by stripping
them of their fundamental liberties. No. She was terrified that she would smell
bad. So she had stopped using shampoo now, in preparation for a day when it
would no longer be available.

Whether or not American civilization
falls — it will, of course, but it could happen a year from now, it could
happen in a couple of centuries or it could have already started — whether or
not the dollar expires or the CIA decides there are nuclear bombs in Iran,
Christians do not need to be afraid.

This is difficult to accept in the
present media climate, where the word “terror” is in every headline, where edgy
policemen tase Vancouver transit riders for failing to pay their fares and Big
Brother’s closed-circuit eye is constantly watching to make sure that no one
plants bombs in the local recycling bin.

Yet Pope Benedict XVI reassures us
that “History, in fact, is not in the hands of the powers of darkness, chance
or human decisions alone. When evil energy that we see is unleashed, when Satan
vehemently bursts in, when a multitude of scourges and ills surface, the Lord,
the supreme arbiter of historical events, arises. He leads history wisely
towards the dawn of the new heavens and the new earth.”

Christians are not called to live in
terror. Christ instructs us not to “fear those who kill the body but cannot
kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell”
(Matthew 10:28).

The great shadow that lurks on the
horizon is not al-Qaida or a Chinese economic takeover, but Satan. If they
seize your belongings and destroy your home, pull you from your bed in the
middle of the night and torture you for your faith or destroy your hometown in
a nuclear strike, you will only be granted a greater reward in heaven.

But if you refuse to forgive your
husband or sleep around on your wife or you deliberately rob your employees of
their pension plans to line the pockets of your friends, then all the comforts
and the pleasures of the world will one day be the soured-sweet taste of candy
on the breath of a child lured away by a kidnapper.

This is the meaning of the Bible’s
incessant reminders (there are more than 200 of them in Scripture) to “fear the
Lord.”

This fear is not the servile fear of
a slave cowering before the master’s whip, but the fear, born of love, that a
child feels at the thought of disappointing his parents. It is a fear that
provides us with courage, and that strengthens us against temptations to do
evil, a fear that constantly reassures us that “the adventure of humanity is
not confused and meaningless, nor is it doomed never to be appealed against or
to be abused by the overbearing and the perverse.”

That’s how Pope Benedict XVI put it
in a 2005 general audience.

“Thanks to fear of the Lord,” the
Holy Father continued, “we are not afraid of the evil that rages in history and
we vigorously resume our journey through life. It is precisely thanks to fear
of God that we are not afraid of the world and of all these problems, that we
are not afraid of people, for God is more powerful.”

He quoted Pope John XXIII, who once
said, “Those who believe do not tremble because, fearing God who is good, they
are not afraid of the world or of the future.” He also quoted the prophet
Isaiah, who says: “Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees
that are weak. Say to those whose hearts are frightened: ‘Be strong, fear not’”
(Isaiah 35:3-4).

Sadly, this courage is so often
lacking, even among Christians, in the modern world. We sit on our
chesterfields and whine to one another about the state of the world, decry the
evils of abortion and blame the whole thing on homosexual activists or the
radical professors or the CNN anchor-persons.

Always, always, it is someone else.
Yet what are we willing to do?

Most of us lack the courage to stand
for our beliefs in the face of mild social disapproval — a frown or an
uncomfortable silence is sufficient to make us back down. For fear of losing their
jobs, Catholic pharmacists routinely dispense contraceptives and morning-after
abortifacients.

For fear of losing their university
scholarships, budding theologians toe the liberal party line. For fear of
losing their boyfriends, Catholic girls consent to have sexual relations that
offend their consciences and insult their sense of dignity.

Surely
Christ, who stood in front of the crowd of humanity as they cried out “Crucify
him, crucify him!” doesn’t expect us to suffer the ignominy of having others
gossip about us or shoot us dirty looks in the office. And so we keep quiet, we
merely pray for the people that we ought to also be preaching to, always under
the delusion that there is a nice, easy, pleasant way of getting the cross to
the top of the hill.

I
am not immune to this sort of idiotic terror. Every time that I sit down to
write something mildly controversial, there’s that little voice yammering in
the back of my head: “You can’t write that. People will think that you’re
insane. They’ll hate you. They’ll write nasty letters. They’ll curse you and
all of your children for generations and burn the hearts of ravens to summon
dark gods against you. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if you just wrote
that Jesus is a fuzzy teddy-bear?”

Such timidity, when it leads us to
jeopardize the spirit out of fear for the flesh, is a sin.

In Part 2, we will unmask the
dreadful deceits that this fear uses to magnify its power in the soul.

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